Organizations often provide computing devices, such as laptop computers and other types of mobile devices, for use by their employees. These computing devices may include data that the organizations want to protect from industrial espionage. For example, companies may want data associated with new products, sales projections, expansion plans, and the like to be securely stored on the computing devices that are provided to employees to prevent the information from being obtained by non-employees, such as competitors. As another example, government agencies may wish to protect sensitive government data stored on employee computer devices from being obtained by other governments.
A typical solution to protect data on a computing device is to password protect the computing device and/or the storage device used by the computing device. However, such protection schemes may be easily circumvented. For example, the password may be guessed using information about the employee, such as the employee's birthday, mother's maiden name, pet's name, names of the employee's children, etc. As another example, a password generator may be used to generate and test many passwords. As yet another example, because the protection scheme must compare an entered password with the correct password, the correct password may be stored on the storage device, enabling a software program to identify the correct password by scanning the contents of the storage device. As a further example, the employee may be bribed or coerced into providing the correct password. Thus, protection schemes used to protect and/or secure data on a computing device may be circumvented in a variety of ways.